Guns Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the last 13000 years. by Jared Diamond

Diamond has written this excellent text with a very simple thesis: about 11000 years ago the whole of earth was settled with anatomically modern humans, who lived off the land. From there people developed societies and technologies of differing complexity. These differences can be explained by differences in geographical circumstances, rather than differences between the people themselves.

While his history includes everybody for the last 13000 years, it stops at around 1450 AD, when European colonisation started and interrupted the independent development trajectories in different regions.

It is very interesting to me that the Fertile Cresent is located near the area of the byblical Eden, and that the two sons of Adam and Eve became a herder and a tiller.

The significance of that botanical wealth is illustrated by the geographer Mark Blumler's study of wild grass distibutions. Among the world's thousands of wild species, Blumler tabulted the 56 species with the largest seeds, the cream of nature's crop: ... they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Fertile Cresent or other parts of Western Eurasia's mediterranean zone, which offered a huge selection to the incipient farmers: about 32 of the world's 56 wild grasses! ... In contrast, the Mediterranean zone of Chile offered only two of those species, California and southern Africa just one each, and southwestern Australia non at all. That fact alone goes a long way toward explaining the course of human history.